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On September 30, 2016 Black Marble will release their second full-length, It’s Immaterial. Their first for Ghostly, It’s Immaterial follows up their EP Weight Against the Door (Hardly Art) and highly acclaimed debut full-length A Different Arrangement (Hardly Art). Still featuring Chris Stewart at the helm along with select collaborators as supplementation, the project's recent shift in locale from East Coast to West Coast lends a great deal to the overall feel of the new album: the light and dark elements of shadows, the salt and sting of evening’s high tide sea spray, a beautiful thing left on a shelf too high to maintain. The general mood is that of creating something new, but going back in time to do it. Like attempting to flesh out a song that you woke up humming but can’t find because it doesn’t exist yet.
With the end of the East Coast chapter of Stewart’s life on the horizon, It’s Immaterial was recorded in a period of mental and physical transition, trapped between spaces and unable to move on until the snow globe flurry of ideas floating around him settled just right. It’s Immaterial is soaring and muted all at once. It's a collection of songs pieced together from perfect seeming snippets heard while passing open doors. It's a framework in which your imagination creates its own version of what you need to hear but didn’t have a way to describe - like a favorite song heard on an unlabeled mixtape by a band you can’t uncover.

With both early releases the band followed a familiar path stomped down in the late 70's and early 80's by a kindred assemblage of synth acts whose gauzy tape sounds and DIY ethics paved the way for other likeminded artists. Pulling from the handmade approach of late 70's synth wave pioneers like Silicon Teens, Iron Curtain, Lives of Angels, and Solid Space, Black Marble dialed in on a clear understanding of its own specific sound, which has since evolved. Channeling Robert Palmer's early Island years, vocals have been pushed forward - their delivery more desperate. The result is a feeling more immediate yet claustrophobic.

“It's a lot of psychic turmoil about time, place, and the dissatisfaction that comes with being young and not having control over place, or being old and not having control over time,” Stewart says about the album. “The record is filled with characters trying to convince themselves, and others, to change or to see things differently or to come along with them somewhere. It’s that moment of wanting between knowing and doing but frozen in time.”

It’s Immaterial is a further evolution in Black Marble's sound. Where the songs featured on their debut full-length seemed to hiss from a vent in the floor, the new tracks seem to be coming from the next room. Written, recorded, mixed, and performed entirely by Stewart, the new songs are a unified vision - one person’s attempt to patchwork together bits of vapor and the most subtle gleanings of preference to make something wholly new. It's an endless drive in the passenger seat of a car while listening to everything you’ve ever loved, but lasting only 40 minutes.

Formed in 2012 in the wasted sands of Tempe, Arizona, electronic dance faction Body of Light have proven to be a teeming creative force within the present-day electronic landscape. As the archaic drones and abstract measurements of their earliest collections have evolved into to prodigious cinematic pop ballads and darkwave compositions, it’s clear that the two brothers, Alex and Andrew Jarson, are no strangers to blurring the compositional lines that confine underground music. Having worked together and separately over the years within the folds of the co-founded Ascetic House collective, Alex and Andrew have given life to a variety of projects such as Otro Mundo, Blue Krishna, Somali Extract, and Memorymann, and also have unveiled over a dozen visual, audio, and written works under various other monikers. Body of Light is simply another extension of their exercised method of immediate and natural experimentation.

After previous releases on Chondritic Sound and Ascetic House including Follow The Current, Lustre, Universal Sin, Volantà Di Amore, and Limits of Reason, Body of Light teamed up with Dais Records for their 2016 LP Let Me Go. This release shows the bands evolved sound from embryonic ideas to fully-realized synth-pop anthems and erotic aesthetics. Let Me Go came full circle under the production guidance of engineer Ben Greenberg (Uniform/ The Men), and each song follows the next with lucid moments of catharsis and romanticism that pull from their self-conscious mysticism and lawless spiritual hedonism.

Hesitant to define themselves strictly as a “synth-pop” collaboration, the brothers incorporate a wide variety of components into Body of Light’s sound. They attempt to formulate an unparalleled artistic direction filled with decay, warped tape loops, aging VHS home-movie sound samples from their childhood, primitive waveforms, and processed vocals tinged with harmonic specters. Their aim is to utilize past and present technologies in a way that feels unique, honest and sensible.

PYRAMID CLUB

It was only a matter of time before Chris Daresta (Anticipation, ex-Roman Photos) and Matt Weiner (TWINS, Featureless Ghost, CGI Records) started producing music together. Both Daresta and Weiner, along with James Andrew (Tifaret), run DKA, the goth-and-cold wave powerhouse that issues records and books various shows and goth danse parties around the city. Together as Pyramid Club, the duo now embark on a new musical chapter: producing freewheeling sets of sequenced synth music that intersects both musician’s backgrounds.